Physician, Heal Thyself

Every year, missed hospital appointments cost the National Health Service (NHS) £790m, including £18m in Scotland alone. Breaking this down, each ‘no show’ costs the health service an average of £110 in wasted time. At a time when savage cuts are ravaging the NHS, writing off such losses is unthinkable, particularly when cheap and easy solutions exist to wipe out this costly problem.

Forgetting an appointment is all too easy, yet for healthcare providers, it is too expensive and impractical to devote administrative time to reminding and chasing patients. A far easier way to eliminate missed appointments is to automatically issue reminders via an SMS (text message) to the patient’s mobile phone. This has numerous, significant advantages.

Targeting the text generation
The worst culprits for missing appointments, GPs’ own findings show, are 16-34 year-olds - the text generation. While they might ignore a voice call, or fail to open an email, research confirms that the majority of people, particularly in this age group, will open and read a text message – promptly, too.

The reminder itself is enough to ensure that most honour their appointments. Where this isn’t possible, the healthcare provider has a chance to reschedule – giving the current appointment to someone else, thereby reducing waiting lists, while issuing a new date and time to the original patient.

Dedicated mobile healthcare applications exist now to automate much of this process, by integrating routine text reminders with existing hospital/surgery/clinic diary and calendar systems. There is even the potential for the system to automatically offer and book alternative dates and times, and to contact patients on the waiting list to offer them the last-minute cancellations.

It isn’t just doctors’ surgeries or hospital departments that stand to benefit from such facilities - dental practices, opticians and physiotherapists all suffer from the same issue of making the most of their billable time.

Costs pennies, saves pounds
What’s most exciting of all is that deploying such solutions is extremely affordable - particularly when contrasted with the huge losses that are being incurred with every missed appointment. Where the knock-on effect of a no-show is a lot of extra administration, not to mention the waste of a consultant’s valuable time, adding up to a loss each time of £110, the most it will cost the healthcare provider to manage and issue a text reminder is a few pence per person.

Finding spare capital is particularly tough in the current climate, but use of a text service qualifies as operational expenditure, which is much easier to get approved - especially in the face of huge potential savings, and the positive implications for reducing waiting lists and improving patient care, all of which are key Government targets.

Health service providers don’t even have to manage the system themselves; it can be provided as a remotely-hosted, complete solution, requiring no investment in special hardware or software. The service uses the administrators’ existing calendar and patient contact systems, and the recipient’s own mobile phone.

Staff scheduling
The  potential applications extend beyond missed appointments, too. Automated text contact could also be used to bring greater consistency and reliability to staff scheduling - for example, for last-minute deployment of agency staff in response to an unforeseen absence, or a sudden peak in workload. Scheduling and co-ordination of community visits could be similarly managed. Today, such processes rely heavily on voice messages and voice calls, without the benefit of diary integration. The result is a lot of chasing, and lost time.

With an integrated SMS (text) solution, contact is made swiftly, and appointments confirmed or changed in a timely fashion. Best of all, virtually no manual intervention is needed, almost completely eliminating administration costs.

The outcome is a win-win all round - consultants’ time is more fruitfully spent, and can be reimbursed accordingly; waiting lists are significantly reduced as more appointment slots are filled; patient care is improved; and a huge and a potentially costly administrative burden is lifted.

Missed appointments and costly ‘dead’ time are an issue for healthcare providers the world over. Under more pressure than most at the moment, the UK has an opportunity to lead the way in harnessing a commonplace, mainstream technology to transform fundamental patient administration in a way that’s easy, natural and costs little more than a sticking plaster.

Physicians, this is a real chance to heal yourselves.

Shane Leahy is Group CEO at Oxygen8 Communications